scott-martin

It's all right to grumble. Sometimes it changes the world, sometimes the world just changes. I probably spent 20 years being p r o f o u n d l y bratty about the Seshnegite Book of Kings being unavailable at any price and I couldn't even score an affordable Nomad Gods to see what that damn Three Bean Circus was all about. Over time, windows opened, maybe just to shut me up. Maybe some day they'll all be open to everyone. For me (and I am talking too much, largely do demonstrate how someone distant from the fandom until fairly recently can still contribute to the overall noise) the biggest benefit of the hard-won rarities was confirmation that there isn't a vast amount of apocrypha weighing on all our own explorations. There really isn't a text in the archive that Greg was 100% happy with that we don't all have now in at least Stafford Library format. There are drafts, fragments, wrong turns and dead ends . . . but by definition, none of that stuff achieved formal completion. There's nothing Finished lurking to trip us up. All there is back there is ideas, possibilities, glimpses into his process. That's hugely liberating. I hope everyone reading this can feel that anxiety of influence lift. You can make whatever you want out of the scraps left behind. It's how Greg actually worked. I needed to be sure so I checked and trust me, everybody's free (to feel good). Now that said, the scraps are high-grade prompts and collectible in their own right. Some day there might be a critical edition showing how the ideas evolved and all scholars can work with all the notes. How great!

It's hard but it's the world we have. They do emerge for those who keep their eyes open and their bow strings waxed. They did for me! As people know, I have never gotten a chance to attend a Chaosium-oriented game convention. Those same people will probably be amused to hear that I forgot at least two significant early iterations of the Arkat story . . . one the short undated "Saga of Arkat Chaosbane" and the long handwritten "Arkat Saga" that appears in the RQ Classic reprint package and starts with "The Wife of Humakt." There must be 70-80 copies of that one circulating so when someone quits, dies or reprioritizes they'll come up. Then let fortune favor the bold! Because it's relatively "common," it would be funny if the handwritten saga is the one Greg thought he lost but I haven't done intense dating on those yet. One day we'll be able to make an educated guess. Also at least one version of "July 20 1987" exists without any thinking or talking at all. Just starts right out with the monsters who didn't think we could see in the dark. It's a good haunted field. Still opportunities and upsets.

His process and communications coming out of Avalon Hill and into the shocking King of Sartar are highly undocumented. Kindly step into my humble spell trading kiosk, we have fresh juices and tobacco to loosen your reminiscences, I believe I am addressing "the historical" Mr Starling?

This is great!! I think every Arkat devotee has a unique journey . . . and the journey is the part that really matters. We all cut our way through the jungle of mythology on our own in the end. The jungle of Arkat is especially confusing. Greg never really figured it out in print himself so all we can do is use the trail of his exploration as a hint and not as the solution to the mystery. We can talk about that but it gets noisy. The Arkat cult hasn't had much of an exoteric manifestation for about 900 years now. It circulates in whispers. The gatekeepers charge arbitrary tolls as proof of intent and to support their own hustle. At this point it's all guru yoga and you know how gurus get. But the line of transmission somehow extends all the same. I was just an impressionable child when I heard there would be a Sartar Campaign some day, so I probably wouldn't have been able to find or afford it then anyway. In 40 years I hope people are still participating in that alpine land in ways we can't even anticipate yet. Then I went to work, so was always too busy to travel to the lore . . . ultimately, I started buying or bargaining it from those who made the journey. Occasionally an initiate would quit or die and the relics would get dispersed. Keep your eyes open long enough, blow your horn at the right times and the doors really do open. Was it worth it? Did I get what I needed? It's been a pretty good use of time. We all could have talked to Greg more than we did but now none of us can contact him directly via everyday channels. We're all in the same place. Access to texts is helpful but if the secret is there in itself, I don't have it. You got to talk to him! Cherish that because you got in before the door closed in the face of every fan to come. My only real achievement is being the bona fide last member of the Issaries Trade Association, only arriving at that party when it was practically over. Being the last is still better than missing out entirely. The question is always where we go from here. You're going to do great things. I don't think Argrath is Arkat. I think his mother was eccentric and possibly a visionary as well, but the name and its resonances stuck. He leaned into mythology. That's where you are. I'd rather meet several independent illuminati than an Arkat at this point. Take the techniques and write a world. The materials you need will emerge when you need them. --[]-- So I am loving these comparisons and hope all the secret keepers will pipe up, or at least a quorum. This is part of the challenge of publishing this story, of course. There's no authoritative text. We work with the version that finds us. Blue Arkat (June 24 1994 a/k/a 1987 etc . . . I think this is more or less the one on ebay right now) starts in a hilariously transitional state, so it's obviously the best fit for me. "I Remember When Arkat Was Born" is of course pulled out of Troll Gods and you already know the origin of Kingtroll. The man from the island is more elusive. This one ends with "court martialed for doing sorcerous things."

If I were Chaosium, I would keep a Stafford Library extension low on the priority list as well, but maybe for slightly different utilitarian reasons. Then there will be a treat at the end of this post. Start with a review of how Unfinished Works functioned when Greg was alive. He was never 100% happy with them but it was a good way to monetize rough drafts when he needed the cash flow. He never got around to finishing them. As others have hinted, titles like Arkat's Saga exist in a more fragmentary / less "finished" state and I suspect that was a big reason he never pushed them out in the Wizard's Attic series. He just didn't think they were worth turning into commercial products yet. We can argue with him but that's just how it played out. Now it's true that someone could build a commercial product on the foundation . . . but we don't need Unfinished Works any more so there's a strategic question of the role that product would play within the larger Gloranthan publishing trajectory. Jeff has been busy feeding the RQ side and getting things like The Sartar Campaign out the door. More of us than I want to think about have been dreaming for 40 years about seeing that title. It's tantalizingly close now. After that, who knows? But whatever it will be, it will be "finished" and the creative team can move on to the next thing. We don't have to survive on rough drafts and bullet point notes any more. It's exciting! Arkat's Saga can't really develop unless it becomes either a novelistic work of metafiction or a game product. As we'll see, there really isn't a lot of game product in it, so the only way this unfinished work gets finished is basically by starting from scratch (total gut renovation) or turning it into a normal sort of fantasy novel. The gut renovation game product route wouldn't be an attractive publishing project for me at least for years to come because the path of least resistance would be a Dawn Age Seshnela experience and right now in theory the terminal Third Age is where the action is. You're taking development cycles away from the terminal Third Age to feed an untested and potentially alien spinoff experience. Save the spinoffs for when you can't think of anything to do in the terminal Third Age. And if you want a novel, similar logic applies. Plus you need to find a really good commercial novelist who gets the deep logic of Greg's vision, which is tough. Furthermore, even if you succeed either way, it only confuses people. This would be my biggest red flag from a publishing perspective. Say Arkat's Saga (or Jonat's Saga or Damol's Saga or Hrestol's Saga, Snodal's Saga) becomes a huge hit. Great! But then you need to take time and effort to remind fans of that slice of the Gloranthan experience that "our" baseline setting is nothing like that, the world is very different, everything you know and love is wrong. That's no fun. Imagine how Third Age fans would have felt if Mongoose had taken the world by storm. Or if you had that feeling back then, think back to the confusion and consternation. We don't know enough about the status quo Third Age West yet. Until we do, all these First Age data points are worse than useless. They're potentially misleading, at risk of being overruled down the road . . . it's not just Chaosium that could waste its effort here, the readers who extrapolate are going way out on thin ice. Nobody wants that. But of course we aren't the mass market gamers who will get confused here. We're hardcore. We know how to handle ourselves on thin textual ice. We'll figure out a way to get the texts we need. The bar on this one is set at $350 cash right now but collectors are resourceful in pursuit of the quest object. Greg didn't want to make this one particularly easy for you, but Travel and Journey. Talk to people. Do side missions. Start a petition. Send in a proposal of how you would make this a viable Finished Product. In olden days they had to go to conventions to get these peeks behind the curtain. Who knows what shakes loose in life? If you try sometimes you just might find you get what you ne-eed. Oh yeah. So what's in that damn thing? Get ready for that treat. Mine is blue, about 40 pages in all and is probably Greg's third attempt to get the original Arkat narrative into a coherent form. One previous version, probably the first, got written in a fever and got lost. Another survives as a fairly straightforward historical narrative of the Gbaji era, but this is not that. This is from 1987 and mine incorporates additions and revisions up to 1994. It's an impressionistic ground-level view of military life, an endless and nihilistic conflict something like Vietnam. Arkat himself only appears in glimpses, reviewing or fraternizing with the grunts like nominal narrator Saralos Deguys, fresh from the island and wrestling with caste transgression. The real Arkat is always elsewhere. Think of a King of Sartar told mostly through dialogue and first-person observation, supplemented with explanatory data dumps and outside fragments: the colonial perspective, the hsunchen perspective. It's Pynchonian in its way, a kind of hoax or satire on hegemonic narratives. The world it describes may or may not be the Dawn Age West that continues into RQG. I like to think that it is and that the world has changed a lot in the intervening millennium, but like St Halwal I am passionate about the redemption of trash. What has to happen to get from then to now, with the Middle Sea Empire material anchoring the arc in between? Who were these people? Where do they go? We learn things about the island that nobody in the terminal Third Age could even countenance. They break all the fragile scholarship we have. Greg evidently realized this because he didn't bother to confirm these data points in Middle Sea Empire. That's important to keep in mind here, too . . . you can't get from this place to the terminal Third Age except through the mediation of the God Learners, who had a vested interest in erasing much of it and then were themselves erased, leaving us to build a new second-order world on the rubble. Meanwhile Greg himself moved on in the decades that followed. He focused more on that part in the middle (sea) and then came back to work on the Guide. That's the West that survives. If I were one of those esoteric Arkat buffs I would be able to open the heroquest route to this material and see for myself. Maybe I'd be disappointed. Maybe I'd be illuminated. Until you've tasted it, what do you really know? And then, of course, it's too late. We don't really get to meet Arkat face to face. When I was a child learning how to decode parables, the faceless character was usually a self portrait, a void on which we project aspects of our own identity. Arkat and his good friend Saralos Deguys are like that, more mirrors than floodlights. But we can approximate their shapes from the world they inhabit. These, unfortunately, are the kinds of questions some unfortunate soul developing this particular property to a commercial stage would need to wrestle down in order to negotiate the threats. I am not an esoteric Arkat buff. I'm a relatively simple person. Holy books are hard.

Thanks to you guys I know now why the Swarm moved from west to east (to incorporate non-“troll” dark lines on the paternal side similar to “dehori” input into other mistress projects) but more on that anon. Unless of course Samastina enthusiasts want to pick this up…!

Before the Council Broke, the orlanthite tribes bred freely with people we would now classify as trolls. Traces of this can be found in old pelorian lexicography as well as the original situation of the OOO. It's also an undercurrent in Black Arkat. This is how to repair the curse of kin but nobody polite likes to think about it.

When Rhino Tribe breaks wind no apologies are required because there are no survivors. Love this totem talk. The lemon drop ones might need to convince some people that they're part of the stretch but I give those heffalumps the benefit of the doubt until Rhino Khan kicks his truth into me. On the other hand my vision isn't that great.

I love this. When we were kids we had a slogan, "the analogy stretches until it snaps." To the extent to which these are rhino-like creatures, experience and accounts of earthly rhinos informs and enriches our Gloranthan insight. We can even stretch that simile to derive new hypotheticals: they eat something like this, they breed something like that, the leather needs these techniques to work, the smell sure must be something. Sometimes experience reveals a point where the analogy breaks down. Greg didn't know something about rhinos and just made it up / quested deep into the true lozenge or there was a typo and now Praxian rhinos always had four toes and ivory dentition like a hippo. It happens. Then all the hypotheticals need to make room for the new data point and resolve contradictions. Suddenly there's ivory on the chaparral. The desert trackers prick up their ears. It's a little like experimental heroquesting. Maybe they have actual plates that provide instant two-point armor, but I don't actually think so because it would wreck everything we know about the local economy. Pixie rhino milk probably tastes like a ginger lime rickey though. Some seek Glorantha one way, chasing the analogy until it snaps, and others go the other. And then there's those who go both ways. The rhino emerges. Rhino riding, to paraphrase Eco, requires a rhino. It's how we get to where we're going. Go as far as you can.

Not a tangent at all. I was just looking at the implied secret history of the West Reaches again. In a future that even briefly contains a Free Carmania, a lot of that history is going to rise to the surface like a strange woman lying in a pond distributing swords. Carmanian sorcery. Lunarized Carmanian sorcery. Spolitism. Entekosiad. Syranthir's achievement. Blue is a complicated color in the fandom . . . much of the chatter here points toward the western expressions (zzabur vadel) but the empire's historical relationship with water people is strangely fraught. A Hero War is our last chance to settle the questions.

Most of us are still grappling with scraps here, which is one of the deep ulterior motives behind these threads. The Empire only incidentally faces Argrath in the known 1621-5 window. Most of its sprawling attention is elsewhere, on transregional policies, politics and processes like the ones we are reviewing now. Half the time I am inclined to think the entire Monster narrative is an apocalyptic fragment that got copied into the more secular Argrath Saga (hail the harshax) and then traveled with it thereafter like Revelations appended to the Bible . . . or the non-synoptic Gospel of John, for that matter. An interloper. A different perspective. Maybe even a contradictory perspective, more concerned with a psychedelic ("bardo") theory of consciousness than secular reportage. Supposedly, however, revisionist historians say the Red Emperor experiment ends in 1648. This is not necessarily Sheng, who rules the [Shadow Moon]{New Moon} until a notional Gardint date of 1650.

Loving the cosmic handshake emerging here. "In the Greater Hero War There Is No East Or West." That said, the notion of Phargentes TakenEgi being the in-game collector / repairer of recalcitrant "moons" around the lozenge is really funny. Maybe this is where the Blue and Red come to terms, on the purple edge of the world. Who hates the purple people? Altinelans. What color is their moon? White. It's also interesting in this context that the Lunar march to Sog doesn't feel much like the Monster Empire of Selero-Argrathian propaganda. There may be truly multiple empires at this stage, each big as a moon. Or the Monster may not emerge until the late 1640s or even later. Either way, a note of hope for the true moonies and caution for those expecting Sheng right around the corner. The world needs time to get that far off its moorings. East and West. To continue the handshake, if I were into the fine doctrinaire politics of sorcery, I would spend all my free effort trying to hack the Valkaro Method. This is more than an exotic novelty. Valkaro figured out how to run the system without talar intervention or oversight. It's a big deal that their western brothers will want to be able to copy as the talar function evolves in the west and the island takes a hungry glacier to the face.

Thanks for the memory prompt. When you mentioned that I flashed back to Elder Secrets. (It probably appears elsewhere as well.)

It's nebulous, which goes nicely with the metaphysical "this is a bardo experience, somebody's consciousness breaking down / stepping up" interpretation but is tricky to align with more simulationist models elsewhere. We know Godunya is still officially extant at this stage because his passivity is part of the frustration, so this is well before the Summer Land exit . . . but if the Circle of Infinite Power helps trigger 1625, then we know the emperor persists in his material form at least to that point. If I were gambling I'd say that the War starts in the 1622-30 phase so it might already be a factor in the "Eastern Hero Wars Status Quo" . . . but again, time may be one of the constraints that break down as the emperor abandons the world. The dragons they sent west need a little time to return. In theory many if not all of the "demonic" or antigod aspects of the Eastern Hero War prophecies are simply more masks of the soul that need to be negotiated, embraced, absorbed and ultimately transcended before the process can continue. This would include people like Can Shu and his ten thousand conspiracies and fake cults, the "funeral for the outside world" ceremony and so on. Where Ignorance Is, Splendor Follows, to quote Freud. It's how the light gets in. What's different this time around is that Yanoor officially hung around for centuries after the Sunstop in some form (and so could have interacted with the Nysalorians and/or Arkatites across the ancient Redland trade corridor, one of my current obsessions) whereas the Godunya expression is now exhausted . . . at least to all known appearances. Deep Sources and board games will provide additional incident. While I would love it if the God Learners derived their notion of a "death spider" responsible for the Sunstop from Kralorelan sources, we would need evidence that our girl is known in that part of the world. However, they might have brought awareness of her cult Eest and it could have spread from that contact . . . not a lot known about her second age footprint. She might even have been one of the foreign devils they used to keep the locals in line.

I'm reminded of the existence of a Winter Win or northeastern (remember, the poles may have shifted 30-45 degrees) survival story in which Chen Durel participates along with the Blue Moon mutants and the Himile forces of the glacier. These people have a memory of cooperation and some kind of earned mythic compatibility. But that's among the trolls and for their enthusiasts to plumb. What's going on in serene Kralorela where the Golden Age never ended beyond a few invigorating interruptions? "Benevolent blessing binges" that lead to spontaneous outbreaks. Warring underground factions. "Random" ancestral curses suggesting a breakdown in propitiation or even explanatory systems. Scapegoats. Emergency infrastructure repairs. Reverse alchemists. Scapegoats. Zombie press gangs. Food riots. Starving hordes. Mass crucifixion. All the neighbors are pressing in on the center. The sacred oxen are on the move. The Huan To are coming. "Be tattered." That doesn't sound like the mandate of heaven is secure. It almost raises the unspeakable possibility that the exarch cabal gathering in the capital could be a coup hastening the emperor toward enlightenment. If not, "no blame," but it probably ripples across the Dragonrise one way or another. Either way, the function of the East suggests that atrocious external events are best read as the ordeal of somebody's soul. The question is whose if not Godunya.

I am loving all of this. This kind of concentrated debate is how the West (or any of the lozenge's corners) achieves a level of complexity and dramatic power comparable + compatible with what the Great Argrath Campaign unleashes for Dragon Pass . . . without the benefit of the intervening decades of experimental drift. What could go wrong? Hallaj (منصور حلاج) and other intoxicated walis are never far from my mind here because this is still part of Glorantha and so is at least open to mercy, miracles and other magical excess. Of course there's a pillar of severity too. We haven't talked much about the Ascended Masters (sri, sar, sifu, sidi, saints) here because no dominant replacement for the old saints has emerged yet. But it will happen. I believe.

Good to see you here. Yeah, I got taken in by the Permanent Full hype. But if even Permanent Half can't keep the horse tribes away from "the outskirts of Raibanth" itself as early as 1624, then adding Sheng to the mix when he returns is really only adding a little insult to grievous injury. This raises a side question of how the Empire recovers its credibility after 1625. Jar-Eel plus the Bat plus the remaining Provincial Army in its entirety is enough to hold Torang, but there aren't a lot of really good southern magicians left to exploit Glow conditions. Whatever forces the King of Wings has on his side need to be countered and exceeded . . . I see a fevered hunt across the continent for lore and paraphernalia, hidden powers. A fun quest for Lunar players and Jar-Eel is evidently part of it. Unless they come back with new weapons, the magical arms race ends before 1630, which is probably not MGF. On the other hand, if the new horse way can overcome Horse Eater so easily then maybe this is the secret origin of Reaching Storm. There's a lot we don't know about the scarier forms of steppe shamanism and they've had a couple of wanes to refine their contacts. Unless those tricky dwarves up there are using their own mountain to fuzz the signal for their own purposes. I appreciate the cryptical verses for taking a trans-regional view of the fate or "dharma" of the eastern quadrant. While the cosmic ambition of Can Shu is clearly the primary interest of the author(s), the inclusion of incidents far from Chen Durel suggests a bigger narrative on the table. Twin Dragon Phoenix might be a storyline open to what we could call an Upper Hero War, leaving the various coalitions we see in the other surviving plates to resolve the truly Vithelan or Eastern bardo. Whether this ever becomes material history or remains allegorical / spiritual is just one of those questions we confront as we reach for the gates of dream. It makes a ripping yarn though with its scary monsters and super creeps. As far as the north goes, the early Empire may have simply wanted to keep ambitious sun cultists from getting too chummy with the Blue Moon at too early a stage. What's remarkable to me is that the Dara Happans were willing to revolt in order to travel in that direction and Glamour was willing to enforce the edict in the face of that desire. The world was a lot younger and more volatile then, admittedly, but it seems to have been a big deal. The altinelan intervention at Four Arrows might have scared Glamour. On the other hand, fixing the Kalikos cycle doesn't start until 1593 so the north seems to slip everyone's mind at some stage. Did they not find what they were looking for in the Ice Sea? Or get it early on and then abandon this somewhat uncanny frontier? One of the things I'm hunting in my free time is various precursor "old moons" scattered around the lozenge like the forces eventually integrated into Lunar Prax. The north might be full of that stuff or even undifferentiated Sky that the lunars wanted to keep strategic competitors away from. As of now, IMG the Mistress of Mistresses under Dagori Inkarth is going to have twins. From what I can tell about the (not strictly chronological) system organizing carvings of the Black Mountain School, 7-11 should be read as a single narrative unit covering "the troll plot." This is where we find most of the Blood Sun material, so I suspect the trolls are the ones calling the shots on that particular scheme. (28 is part of an extended apocalyptic "coda" outside the main sequence.) Cragspider is one crafty lady. Perhaps she and Bina Bang come to terms . . . or don't. Red is an interesting color for these people.

Thanks all for indulging this pivot so far. It's really striking how naturally the discussion gravitates to the eastern frontier as true key to the fate of the Lunar Empire. This is where much of what we consider the "classic" modern empire comes from, whether that's via the consolidation of local influences (dominant goddess centers in Karasal up to the Blue Moon) or the imperative to protect the open border. In a lot of ways, the Red"line" History is really the Red"lands" History, the imperial saga that revolves around manifest destiny and the horse tribes. But we know now that the horse tribes were never static. They have a history too (Palbar, for example, was once a nomad religious center, maybe something like the Paps complex) and are open to influences from all directions. They live in a corridor defined by Dara Happa and Chen Durel at the extremes. They're a trade route, that Silk Road. The horse cultural belt defines and in some ways embodies the relationship between these two imperial-magical systems. When Yelm communicates with Vith, it's through the horse tribes. And in the intervening space, local forms (rival suns and sunlets, starlight ancestors, "moons," planets) emerge like mirages in a landscape that's little more than sky. Apply the right kind of pressure to the right pool of influences and you get mutant movements . . . like the Ghost Dance or the Boxer Revolt or Mao's revolutionary doctrine. Maybe this has been going on for longer than people think and once in every couple millennia you get a Lunar Way emerging from the interaction of Karasal, Rinliddi, liminal states like Velthil and Althil. But that's another story. In a way it's a shame that Greg's angels let him linger in archaic Dara Happa and western Pelanda so long that we only get the deep past of the Mothers' own country in isolated asides. This project has me looking into ways to harness machines to spin up new Deep Sources to build on for the East and elsewhere. What could possibly go wrong with that? For now, all we really need to grapple with is that the horse people learned another new religion from the Nights of Horror, the way of West King Wind and his brothers. (The "westernness" of the Aks tribes is suggestive. They're looking toward and probably beyond Dara Happa for their compass of how to be Storm people. East, where the sun rises, is crude and cruel. South is hot. North is cold. West, however, is where the king comes from. We don't know a lot about the influences the burgeoning lunar empire displaced. Some may have gone east like bodhidharma and ultimately seeded this revolution. That said, we don't know a lot about Kralorelan storm either. Maybe their elemental vocabulary consists of transitional forms we would consider bizarre: "solar storm," "black sun" etc. Basko is another power that recedes into the east in an earlier age. Blue Moon and her mythic enemies, Secret Water.) What I am hearing is that the fate of the moon is really resolved in the east. Oraya (Oria) was historically the leading edge of imperial expansion until the east pushed back and, with the west closed, the south became important. (Why did the early empire forbid Dara Happa to look north? Why did that trigger a civil war?) But it's really all about Oraya and the eastern front. This is the real Eel power base, the province they built bespoke and where they are most at home. This is where setbacks cost them the most. Tarsh is a sideshow, a consolation prize. This is where they send Jar-Eel over and over. This is where Jar-Eel as an adult is really formed. (Song and dance.) Beyond the Eels and their interests, there's something out across the steppe the empire wants to negotiate. The Red Hair Tribute is more than another bit of institutional cruelty designed to keep the locals submissive. Anybody can take hostages but then using them to secure a trade route signals something else going on. Iron for silk is nice but what else is being exchanged here? Sheng hates Kralorela. Whatever he inflicts on Dara Happa and the Red Moon is only a means to that end. He looks east. Odds are good that even after he clears out of hell, Peloria is only a place where he can recollect his hidden powers and build new ones to throw at the Shan Shan. He's a syncretizer too. Maybe he'll remind the solar peoples things they've forgotten about birds, stars, suns and horses. I think the Rockwoods my man Larnste seeded to separate rival empires was actually the Eastern Rockwoods and those empires were the Vrimakites and the Hykimites, bird and dragon people. But I can't prove it yet. I think it's suspicious that the modern Glow fails to defend the east. Either the locals have turned it off for reasons of their own, it isn't working or even Permanent Full just isn't enough to interfere with whatever magic the horse people have now. I want to know where they're getting that magic. Otherwise, some combination of the first two scenarios is more likely. Maybe after that, they decide the entire grid needs updated. Spolite magic probably runs on Permanent Dark, for example. I love the Heretics Country. Let's do it. It's interesting that while Sheng looks east, Can Shu seems to look west. He might not be a central factor in an Eastern Hero War at all (I'd look more closely at whoever oppresses Kralorelan peasants and mandarins!) but more about a Lunar Hero War. Either way, until someone recovers the early cryptic verses it's hard to tell. Maybe that's one thing we can do here. (The mythic South will emerge in its time, as will Up and Down. Center is its own Hero War, bringing us back to Dragon Pass.)

An interlude to share what you know about the Redlands as the terminal Third Age approaches.

It's been a fertile season for insight but this is the hottest thing I've seen all week. The charm uses Love Family to augment my defense against disease spirits. And these augments are theoretically transferrable if the right passions are in play . . . tie a ribbon to the lance, wear the wyter's favorite hat.

This is one of the greatest truths / illusions on this site . . . for most of these blitz kids out across the bridges and tunnels in the skyscraper's shadow even Permanent Full is an aspirational thing, "real life" of bronze age squalo[u]r is the dream and only the temporary reality of Saturday night matters. Levitating lovers need a secret stratosphere. EDIT I actually have A Debbie Harry Story now, bequeathed into my care by one of the old people we care for. How wonderful. She apparently had a "bag lady disguise" that she was extremely proud of and would pull out at the slightest provocation. Fooled nobody.

I seem to recall one showing up in Sebastiane so there's the creative anachronism and the pain all in one package! Unless I'm stuck on the Western Hero Wars and seeing knightriders everywhere. But I do think Glamour is a special test of the "reality" behind the lunar mystique so this book might always be a little frustrating. There's just no historical "there" there to establish any kind of canon around. Only thing to do is stick to other imperial scenes (Jillaro is beautiful and mostly real) or surrender . . . in dreaming we're free.

I love all this stuff and your points are well taken. There's room for multiple interpretations of the City because every experience will be very different. I think of how Fellini Satyricon is a kind of "science fiction of the past" whereas Fellini Roma forces the motorcycles to negotiate ancient streets. But I think Glamour would flicker out entirely if you dropped the funhouse glow. Only way to find out is to create similar books for Raibanth, Elz Ast, even historical Torang and see what sticks and what vanishes.

Madame has a lot to answer for, including all the bois I've known who rocked a d.a. Elvis TakenEgi as ultimate lesbian icon. Suddenly I realize the flamenco dancer so prominent in Derek Jarman's work for the Pet Shop Boys (and stolen/contaminated in COIL fan cuts) is probably someone in the lunar nomenklatura, one of the flaming creatures. Great thread! EDIT: Red Dancer of Power, obv

If I were betting now I would want them to find the answer to an extremely simple question What is the secret of the [world], whom does it serve Not all of them will get it. There will be wrong answers along the way. It's how we get there.